Guelph Politicast

GUELPH POLITICAST #393 - You’ve Got Mailbag!

This week's podcast is dedicated to you, the people, who sent in questions for this Guelph Politicast mailbag over the weekend. Guelph is filled with lots of curious people who are deeply concerned about issues and politics, and some of you came up with some very deep and probing questions for this first mailbag edition since well before the start of the pandemic. Get ready for 45 minutes of one annoying person talking!
Here are the topics that the mailbag will cover:
1) Is Doug done?
2) Two concillors per ward versus one.
3) Challenges to the incumbent mayor.
4) Internet voting.
5) The police budget.
6) Affordability.
7) Changes to the Blue Box program.
8) Guelph Politico.
So let's dig into the mailbag on this week's episode of the Guelph Politicast!
Don't forget to sign-up for the Guelph Politico Tip Sheet on Substack. Please feel free to send guest suggestions for the 400th episode on December 6 and the Christmas episode on December 20. Stay tuned for the Halloween special next week, plus the second part of the "Caution's Creek" episodes about the Kortright Waterfowl Park, and the Remembrance Day episode marking the 70th anniversary of the end of the Korean War in the week's to come.
The host for the Guelph Politicast is Podbean. Find more episodes of the Politicast here, or download them on your favourite podcast app at Apple, Google, TuneIn and Spotify .
Also, when you subscribe to the Guelph Politicast channel and you will also get an episode of Open Sources Guelph every Monday, and an episode of End Credits every Friday.

Open Sources Guelph #445 - October 12, 2023

This week on Open Sources Guelph, we've got to get serious for bit. Well, more serious. As we were enjoying the Thanksgiving long weekend, there was no rest for the people in Israel and the Gaza Strip and now a full-scale war seems to be inevitable. In lighter news though, there's more dysfunction in the Republic Party for us to laugh at, and for the interview this week, we'll head back up Highway #7 to visit another provincial election candidate.
This Thursday, October 12, at 5 pm, Scotty Hertz and Adam A. Donaldson will discuss:
War. A surprise attack on the southern border between Israel and Gaza has sparked some of the worst violence in the region for nearly a decade. Hamas' brutality has been on display, rocket fire has been exchanged and hostages have been taken as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seems to be preparing for an all-out invasion of the Strip in order to root out Hamas. But how many innocent Palestinians and Israelis still have to die? We'll talk about the war, and the political posturing in this country.
Not My Kevin. After having the audacity to work with the opposition party to keep the government open, Rep. Kevin McCarthy is now the former Speaker of the U.S. House. You may recall that it took McCarthy 15 tries to secure the job in January, so his grasp was always tenuous, but far-right members of the GOP seem to think that "My Kevin" is not as ideological as a modern Trump-loving Republican is supposed to be. So what happens next, and who takes over this important and influential role in U.S. politics?
You Only Live Steiss. It might be kind of sticky in Kitchener City Hall these days because two city councillors and one member of staff are all running in the future Kitchener-Centre by-election. This week, we're being joined by the staff member. Kelly Steiss is the Liberal candidate, and she wants to use her two decades of experience working for the City to try and find solutions to healthcare, housing and affordability, but can a candidate of the leaderless Liberals pick up a seat from the NDP and an active Green Party campaign effort? Steiss will answer that and other questions.
Open Sources is live on CFRU 93.3 fm and cfru.ca at 5 pm on Thursday.

End Credits #316 - October 11, 2023 (The Equalizer 3)

This week on End Credits we're thankful for good movies. Obviously. After a long weekend off, we're back with not just one movie, but one movie and four shorter movies. As you can see from the picture, we're going to mark the VOD release of The Equalizer 3 by talking about why it's so awesome, plus Wes Anderson made some stuff for Netflix. Did you notice?
This Wednesday, October 11, at 3 pm, Adam A. Donaldson and Peter Salmon will discuss:
The Anderson Four. In 2009, Wes Anderson made The Fantastic Mr. Fox, his first feature length stop-motion animated film based on the children's novel of the same name by Roald Dahl. Anderson has returned to stop-motion, but he hasn't gone back to Dahl... Until now! Anderson has made four short films based on four different Dahl stories and they're all available now on Netflix. We're going to talk about all four and discuss whether they work better on their own or as a package.
REVIEW: The Equalizer 3 (2023). Denzel Washington is a movie star, so that's why we're getting a third chapter in a mid-budget action movie series based on a cult classic 80s TV show about a former spy turned vigilante for hire for the everyman. In The Equalizer 3, the action moves from big city Boston to a small town in coastal Italy. as our man Robert McCall (Washington) finds himself in a one man war against the mafia to save his idyllic new home. So is it still satisfying to watch Denzel beat up Euro-trash bad guys or has everything truly been equalized?
End Credits is on CFRU 93.3 fm and cfru.ca Wednesday at 3 pm.

GUELPH POLITICAST #392 – Caution’s Creek Part 1: The Past

This is one of those episodes that’s based on events that predate many of us that have come to call Guelph home in the last few decades. It’s also a story about land issues, and the desire to protect sensitive land from development. It's had a lot of names over the years including the Kortright Waterfowl Park, the Niska Lands, and the Hanlon Creek Conservation Area, but the story around this property is just as complicated to sort out.
Perhaps the most concise history of the area was written in an article by Cameron Shelly for Metroland in 2021. It starts with a man named Horace Mack, a person of unique vision who bought a piece of property at the mouth of the Hanlon Creek for a bird sanctuary in 1948. He called it Niska Farm, “Niska” being the proper Cree name for the Canada Goose, but Mack only got to live his vision a short time. He died in 1959, but his dream would live on till 2005 when the area was finally closed to the public.
Now, nearly 20 years later, there's a plan on the floor about how to proceed with the four portions of the Niska Lands now under management of the Grand River Conservation Authority, and there's pretty much one person to thank for this. Dr. Hugh Whiteley, a retired professor and hydrologist from the School of Engineering at the University of Guelph, secured a pathway to ensure a public process for the redevelopment of this area. So how does he think it's going?
That’s one of the questions Dr. Whiteley will answer on this week’s podcast along with discussion of the site's vast history, the various plans for the area that have come into play over the last seven decades, and the City of Guelph and the GRCA's roles in determining the property’s future. We will also talk about his decision to bring the appeal of the Official Plan to the Ontario Municipal Board, and whether he thinks all sides have lived up to the spirit of that agreement. Plus, what does the future look like?
So let's dig into the past of the Niska Lands before we dig into the future on this week's Guelph Politicast! 
You can see background and information on the Grand River Conservation Authority website. You can also see the GRCA’s future plans for the site and some of the notes provided by the members at their last meeting in the latest Guelph Politico coverage. A final decision about the Niska Lands is likely to come before the GRCA membership at their November 24 meeting
The host for the Guelph Politicast is Podbean. Find more episodes of the Politicast here, or download them on your favourite podcast app at Apple, Google, TuneIn and Spotify .
Also, when you subscribe to the Guelph Politicast channel and you will also get an episode of Open Sources Guelph every Monday, and an episode of End Credits every Friday.
Photo credit: Former Kortright Waterfowl Park executive director Eileen Hammill in 1975 from the Guelph Public Library archives. 

Open Sources Gulph #444 - October 5, 2023

This week on Open Sources Guelph we're thankful for scandal. As we head into the long weekend, we're going to talk about the ongoing issues facing the House of Commons that have kind of made a mockery of Canada on the international stage. It's good fodder for a podcast, which might soon be under the regulatory umbrella of the CRTC. In the back half of the show, we're going to talk about the recent increase in the minimum wage, and why it still isn't good enough.
This Thursday, October 5, at 5 pm, Scotty Hertz and Adam A. Donaldson will discuss:
Third Week Watch. Can you believe this is only the third week of the fall session? It's been a busy three weeks of controversy that's for sure. While Greg Fergus made history by being elected as the first Black Speaker of the House of Commons, the long shadow of Parliament's warm welcome for Yaroslav Hunka and the accusation that the Indian government had Hardeep Singh Nijjar killed continue to linger. We will talk about the latest developments on those issues.
Podcast Away. The CRTC announced last week that they were looking at changes to regulate streaming content, which is a big change from the regular order. Streaming and podcasting has been the Wild West, mostly lawless and left to its own devices, so initiating any kind of regulation is a big change, which is why some people - including foreign provocateurs like Elon Musk and Glenn Greenwald - have been throwing gas on the fire, but what are the real stakes?
Wage Match. Last weekend, the minimum wage in Ontario was increased to $16.55, which makes us the third highest in Canada, but a minimum wage is not a living wage, and depending on where you live in Ontario it's tougher and tougher to close that gap. In fact, the living wage for Guelph is still about three dollars higher than the minimum. This week, we’re joined by Craig Pickthorne from the Ontario Living Wage Network to talk about affordability, the minimum wage hike, and the giant gap in-between.
Open Sources is live on CFRU 93.3 fm and cfru.ca at 5 pm on Thursday.

End Credits #315 - October 4, 2023 (It Lives Inside)

This week on End Credits we get spooky. Halloween is around the corner, and by "around the corner" we mean in the next several weeks. True, there's still a whole month to go before the day, but we begin this episode by visiting a streaming channel that's spooky 365 days a year. And then, in the review, we get spookier still with one of the latest horror movie releases.
This Wednesday, September 27, at 3 pm, Adam A. Donaldson and Candice Lepage will discuss:
Three From Shudder. It's our first show for October, which as you all know is Halloween Month. (Yes, it's a month now.) Did you know that there's a whole streaming channel dedicated to the horror genre? There is, and it's called Shudder. On this channel there's literally a world of horror from movies that count as classics to new stuff that might be the classics of the future. This week, we're each going to pick three movies from Shudder you should check out before the 31st.
REVIEW: It Lives Inside (2023). How does that song go? "Every single one of us has a devil inside." It turns out that that there's some truth in that in Hindu mythology, which is the the basis for the new horror movie, It Lives Inside. Sam is just a high school-aged daughter of Indian immigrants trying to fit in, but her former-BFF Tamira has issues and they all come down to what she has inside some cloudy looking mason jar. In his first film, Bishal Dutta taps into a lot of anxieties around clashing cultures and immigration, but does that translate into a scary movie?
End Credits is on CFRU 93.3 fm and cfru.ca Wednesday at 3 pm.

GUELPH POLITICAST #391 - A National Park (If We Can Keep It)

Since it closed in 2000, the Ontario Reformatory, and the 108 hectares that surround it, have been the source of much conversation, optimism and fantasy. We got the Guelph Innovation District Secondary Plan, we’ve got a Heritage Conservation District Study, and now we’ve got a project to turn the area into a national park. Is creating a national park the end game for the OR Lands we’ve been looking for?
Creating a National Urban Park system was an initiative started by the federal government in 2021, when they pledged $130 million to create 15 sites across Canada with local partners. To become a national urban park, any proposed site has to meet three criteria: it has to conserve nature, connect people with nature, and advance reconciliation with Indigenous peoples. The OR Lands check all three boxes. 
Now, you may be thinking that the OR Lands are already well protected by various heritage designations, but it's the connections to Indigenous heritage that are the most at risk;  an old accessory building that was home to a program that helped Indigenous inmates work through their trauma and led many of them to overcome a life of substance addiction and crime. The proof is there in murals on the wall, in the basement of a building that’s outside the current heritage protections for the rest of the site.
With that heritage at stake, we turn to an expert. Former chair of Heritage Guelph P. Brian Skerritt is leading this effort to turn the OR Lands into a National Urban Park and he joins us on this week's podcast to tell us about it. He'll talk about why the OR lands are the best candidate for a national park in Guelph, the difficulties in accessing the Indigenous history on the site, and what Skerritt would ideally like to see on the property in terms of ensuring that all the heritage there is preserved.
So let's talk about making a national urban park on this week's Guelph Politicast!
You can learn more about the creation of National Urban Parks at Parks Canada website. You can add your name to a petition in support of the OR Lands Urban National Park at the petitions page of the Our Commons website. The Heritage Conservation District Study is in it’s second and final phase, and you can learn more about that on the City of Guelph’s website.
The host for the Guelph Politicast is Podbean. Find more episodes of the Politicast here, or download them on your favourite podcast app at Apple, Google, TuneIn and Spotify .
Also, when you subscribe to the Guelph Politicast channel and you will also get an episode of Open Sources Guelph every Monday, and an episode of End Credits every Friday.

Open Sources Guelph #443 - September 28, 2023

This week on Open Sources Guelph, it all just blew up! It was kind of cruel last week when Ontario's premier came out and apologized for a two-month old scandal on show day, but it was well-timed for the start of the fall session, which we will talk about on this show. In other news, Parliament Hill was not to be outdone in controversy and if you have "100-year-old Nazi" on your Bingo card, we've got good news. And finally, did you know there's an election in Manitoba right now?
This Thursday, September 28, at 5 pm, Scotty Hertz and Adam A. Donaldson will discuss:
Fall Out? Boy. It was a bit of a shock last Thursday when Premier Doug Ford came out and apologized to trying to peel off portions of the Greenbelt for redevelopment and said that he would keep his promise and leave it alone. And that was the end of that, right? Not quite, because the opposition parties still want answers and now all eyes are turning to the Ontario government's deal to redevelop Ontario Place and the potential skulduggery there. Otherwise, how was the first week back at the legislature?
Did Nazi That Coming. An appearance by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the House of Commons on Friday made news, but not the type anyone wanted. Applause was offered for 98-year-old Yaroslav Hunka as a veteran of war against Russia, but what no on apparently realized was that he was a member of the Waffen-SS Galicia Division. You know, a Nazi. House Speaker Anthony Rota has fallen on his sword for the matter, but are the implications bigger than one parliamentarian?
Kinew Trip? Advanced polls are open and everyone in Manitoba is counting down to next week's general election, while the country might actually be counting down to the election of the country's first Indigenous head of provincial government. NDP Leader Wab Kinew looks like he might be leading his party to a victory on Tuesday, making history and defeating the incumbent Progressive Conservatives in the process, but what does he have to do to seal the deal, and what happens next?
Open Sources is live on CFRU 93.3 fm and cfru.ca at 5 pm on Thursday.

End Credits #314 - September 27, 2023 (El Conde)

This week on End Credits, we get a jump on Halloween month with a vampire tale. But lest you think this is some horror movie like Last Voyage of the Demeter, it's got a very pointed historical and political point of view. We're going back to Netflix to review the new political satire El Conde, and along with that, we're going to discuss other similar satires.
This Wednesday, September 27, at 3 pm, Adam A. Donaldson and Tim Phillips will discuss:
Satire Power. So this week we're talking about a political satire, but that doesn't mean a laugh-out-loud comedy. No, sometimes a political satire holds up a dark mirror to the audience and makes them confront a certain reality under the veil of jokes and silliness, and sometimes it borrows from the occasional silliness of our politics and takes it to the extreme. For this week's show, we will talk about some of our favourite satires, from the silly to the serious.
REVIEW: El Conde (2023). Director Pablo Lorrain has done a couple of very stylistic bio-pics with Jackie and Spencer, but those were a warm up for the creative license taken with El Conde. You may think that Augusto Pinochet died in 2006, but in this movie we see the "reel" Pinochet, a 300-year-old vampire in hiding with his greedy family, ungrateful wife, and Russian man servant Fryodor, who's also a vampire. It's a bit weird to take the (after)life of a brutal dictator and turn it into a Universal Monster Movie, but is Lorrain able to make that shot, or will it bounce off the rim?
End Credits is on CFRU 93.3 fm and cfru.ca Wednesday at 3 pm.

GUELPH POLITICAST #390 – How to Cover a Protest in 2023

For years, Guelph has been a hotbed of protest, a very politically inclined city on a variety of issues including climate change, poverty, workers rights, equality, Black Lives Matter, and the systemic abuse of Indigenous peoples. Last Wednesday, direct action was on display again as people gathered in Market Square, but this was a protest completely unlike any other in a number of ways, and we need to take a moment to unpack things.
To recap, last Wednesday morning about about 250 people gathered in Market Square under the banner called “1 Million March 4 Children" to address concerns about sex education, plus parental rights and input. On the other side was a crowd nearly three times the size who had their own concerns that terms like "parental rights" were thinly-veiled attacks on queer youths by erasing them and their identity from schools and the greater community.
For added difficulty, the “1 Million March 4 Children” featured some holdovers from other protests in recent years like anger about mask and vaccine mandates, which no longer exist, or concerns about the United Nations and the World Economic Forum, who have to influence on education policy in Ontario. How do you approach a protest based on misinformation, and how to you talk to the people turned by that misinformation and suspicious of journalists covering the story?
Troy Bridgeman knows something about that. He's a freelance journalist working in Guelph, and if there’s a protest in town, you’ll probably see Troy there with his camera. He's going to talk about how the “1 Million March 4 Children” was a different kind of protest to cover, and the strangeness of having two protests happening at the same time. He will also discuss how people live different lives online, what will happen next with this movement, and what he plans to do with all those hours of protest footage.
So let's talk about protesting and covering a protest on this week's Guelph Politicast!
 You can find Troy Bridgeman’s work on Guelph Today and other Village Media sites, and you can follow him on Twitter at troybridgman. You can also check out coverage of last week’s "1 Million March 4 Children" and the counter-protest at the Guelph Politico main site.
The host for the Guelph Politicast is Podbean. Find more episodes of the Politicast here, or download them on your favourite podcast app at Apple, Google, TuneIn and Spotify .
Also, when you subscribe to the Guelph Politicast channel and you will also get an episode of Open Sources Guelph every Monday, and an episode of End Credits every Friday.